Someone who seems to be into the topic.
Great to have you join this conversaion!
ikeya wrote: ↑Mon May 08, 2023 11:47 pm
NFTs are different in that each one is uniquely identifiable, kind of a like a piece of artwork from the real world. What makes NFTs unique are proof of ownership and provenance. You can make a copy of the picture of an $87,000 bored ape https://nft.coinbase.com/nft/ethereum/0 ... 6f13d/7717 but it will always only ever be a copy. The real one has contract address 0xbc4ca0eda7647a8ab7c2061c2e118a18a936f13d, token #7717 and you can view the provenance on a blockchain explorer like Etherscan. https://etherscan.io/token/0xbc4ca0eda7 ... 13d?a=7717
Well ... I would say that poses kind of a philosphical question: What is an 'original' in terms of digital art?
The 'first copy'?
The very first bits on a hard drive where it was created?
Why am I asking?
Because ...
If we take that as a 'yes', then the uploaded version is ALSO only a copy.
The fact that it has a fixed address online means that a copy of the 'original' has a fixed address online.
Some collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club give you full IP rights to the image. So if someone made a poster with your image on it, you COULD sue them for copyright infringement.
Several things here ...
First of all: To make a claim based on IP law, you need to be the creator.
A picture being an NFT does
not mean you are the creator, it just means you are the 'owner' in a way that is, so far, not legally defined by now.
Secondly, IP law works very different in different countries.
In the U.S., you can 'sell' your IP rights (if you are the creator) - that however is not possible in Germany.
In Germany, you can only sell a licence to profit from an IP, but the intellectual ownership of a piece is completely bound to a natural or legal person and cannot be 'transferred'.
Being the owner does not, in any way, mean that you are the creator and therefore does not grant you anything based on IP law.
So what would be the basis of such a lawsuit?
There is another aspect that is highly important.
An NFT picture (
let's stick with pictures for now) might not even be protected under
any IP laws.
For a picture to fall under IP law at all, the picture must meet a certain threshold of originality. Otherwise, the picture is public domain due to a lack of protectability.
Many of the pictures that are made into NFT pictures are certainly not protectable by IP law, due to their lack of reaching the aforementioned threshold.
You simply cannot sue anyone for using them in any way.
So why protect them by making them into an NFT when the law does not see them as protectable?
(I would even go so far to say that the ape does not fall under IP law, because it seems to be based on a template that is used over and over again. Just adding some colors or a tie or something like that is most likely not enough to reach the threshold.)
There is a huge field where that matters: AI generated pictures.
Right now, the few cases that where handled in courts in the U.S. and in some other countries are clear: No person has any IP rights on any AI generated picture, unless they have significantly altered it by hand.
You can sell them yourself, but you have no hold over them. (Unless the AI generator prohibits you from selling them and declares them public domain in the first place, like all pictures generated with a trial version of Midjourney.)
Others can use them as they like.
The pictures themselves are definitely worthy of being protected by IP law, but since a human did not create them, the law does not apply.
Turning them into an NFT, as well, grants you nothing. Not even ownership because anyone can freely use them as they like.
(There might be a chance that a severely complex prompt can be protected by IP law, but that is a different matter.)
Some NFTs also grant membership to discord channels or even real life clubs.
How do you prove ownership when you are, let's say, in front of a club?
You need some kind of connection between ...
- the piece of work
- the NFT and its address
- you as a person
Or is it like a bearer bond and you just have to prove that you have access to the piece? (By showing you are logged in or something)
As for what the token represents is stored in the metadata generated/returned by the contract for a given token.
Contract between which parties?
Reddit avatars are already NFTs under the covers
I do not understand.
What do you mean?